Houston's most popular dog names for 2018 hit a home run

Houston's most popular dog names for 2018 hit a home run

How proud are Houstonians of winning the World Series? Proud enough to cause a 67 percent increase in dogs named Astro during 2018.

Rover.com, the nation's largest network of pet sitters and dog walkers, dug through the hundreds of thousands of names in its database to come up with the nation's top 10 male and female dog names, as well as those you might hear being called at a Houston dog park.

In addition to sporty names, Houston pet parents paid homage to another hometown industry by naming their dogs things like Frack, Barrel, and Petro.

But since some people would rather go against the grain, Rover also identified the most creative names in Houston, all with a celebrity bent: Patrick Swayze, JJ Watt, Johnny Depp, Prince Harry, and Oprah.

Nationally, people are still leaning toward human names for their furbabies (36 percent, in fact), with Max, Charlie, Cooper, Buddy, and Jack claiming the top five for males and Bella, Lucy, Luna, Daisy, and Lola in the top five for females. Houston's most popular list is nearly identical, the only changes being Rocky subbing in for Jack and Sadie swapping for Lola.

Royalty-inspired names are up 11 percent, while Rover predicts food names will continue to climb with Couscous, Crisco, Cheetos, Pasta, and Ramen making the biggest leaps year over year.